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The Confidence, and the Art, Looked Real

To many people, the art dealer Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz seemed like an enviable man.

He came to the United States from Spain with his Mexican inamorata, Glafira Rosales, some 30 years ago, barely a dollar in his pocket, and only a few words of English at his command.

Soon, he was living life on a grand stage.

He bought a fine house in a wealthy New York suburb, opened an art gallery with Ms. Rosales and maintained auction accounts at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. He boasted of a friendship with Andy Warhol, an audience with the pope and his daughter’s violin performance at the Clinton White House. He created a charity that helped the poor and the sick in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and won awards for his humanitarianism.

Behind the curtain, though, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Bergantiños was engaged in a very different sort of enterprise, a daring forgery swindle that fooled the art world and led collectors to spend more than $80 million on dozens of phony masterworks.

The marketing of these forgeries, many of them sold through the offices of what was once New York’s oldest gallery, Knoedler & Company, has been among the most stunning art market scandals of the last decade. But little of the focus has been on Mr. Bergantiños, who is identified in court papers only as CC-1 — or co-conspirator 1.

But now, Ms. Rosales, 57, is cooperating with federal prosecutors and the authorities are focusing more intently on the role they say Mr. Bergantiños played.

He was the person, they say, who recruited a little-known artist living in Queens to create world-class counterfeits. It was Mr. Bergantiños who treated the canvases to make them look old and then forged the signatures of artists like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, federal authorities say. And much of the $33 million the couple garnered from the sales was shipped to bank accounts in Spain controlled by his brother Jesus.

Mr. Bergantiños, whose identity as Ms. Rosales’ partner and boyfriend is confirmed by other court papers, no longer lives at the Long Island home they once shared. He has not been charged, and efforts to reach him by telephone, email and through his former lawyer and charity were unsuccessful. His former lawyer said he believes that he is out of the country.

But Mr. Bergantiños, 58, left behind a trail of unrelated lawsuits and disputes over allegations of fake art that might have alerted dealers to problems in his business dealings, if only they had known to look.

Many details about Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz — one of several variations of his name that he used — remain obscure, but a compelling portrait emerges through court papers, newspaper accounts and interviews with business associates and friends, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because of the continuing police investigation.

As a young man, Mr. Bergantiños worked in Spain for a construction company run by his brother Jesus Angel Bergantiños Diaz, friends said, and later moved to Mexico where he worked in a restaurant and met Ms. Rosales. He later recounted the couple’s dangerous, dramatic entry into the United States, which he described as a midnight dash across the Rio Grande.

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Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, 58, has not been charged.

By 1984, he was living in New York and waiting on tables in a Spanish restaurant, according to Jesus Manso, known as Lolo, a co-worker who now owns several restaurants in Manhattan.

Mr. Manso recalled Mr. Bergantiños as a man with boundless ambition who told friends a few years later that he had entered the art business, bankrolled by his brother.

He described Mr. Bergantiños as a man brimming with confidence and prone to spinning tall tales. “He believes in himself,” he said. “He believes whatever he says.”

One night, for example, Mr. Manso recalled, they went to a nightclub where the doorman balked at letting them in. Mr. Bergantiños, he said, began to chastise the bouncer, unspooling a story on the spot about how he was an American veteran and deserved more respect.

Other friends remember a gritty determination that pushed him to get a pilot’s license even though he was extremely fearful of flying. When he wanted to learn how to play the piano, he bought two Steinways and diligently practiced.

He approached the art business with similar zeal, becoming a frequent guest on the party circuit in the 1990s, attending gallery receptions, museum cocktail parties and auctions, particularly those related to Latin American art.

“He was a very charming, fun guy,” said Martha Henry, a dealer who remembered how, in conversation, Mr. Bergantiños would lean in, throw an arm around your shoulder, and call you “amigo.”

Even in the early years, though, the art business was dogged by accusations that it dealt in fakes. Ms. Henry said she broke with Mr. Bergantiños after discovering a painting she had purchased from him was a forgery.

Barbara Braathen, a former gallery owner, had a similar experience. She said that in the early ’90s, she bought six works attributed to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat from Ms. Rosales and Mr. Bergantiños, who said they got them directly from the artist.

Ms. Braathen said she was devastated in 1995 when one of the Basquiats was rejected by the artist’s estate’s authentication committee. She sued Mr. Bergantiños and Ms. Rosales, but dropped the suit when the legal bills piled up. Another Basquiat that Mr. Bergantiños sold through Christie’s in 1990 was later declared a fake by the estate.

Former associates said Mr. Bergantiños was himself wary of purchasing fakes. After observing him sniff a canvas once, a friend asked Mr. Bergantiños what he was checking for. The smell of tea, Mr. Bergantiños replied, noting that it was commonly used to make a canvas appear older that it really was.

By 1995, Mr. Bergantiños and Ms. Rosales were established enough to open a gallery, King Fine Arts, in Chelsea.

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Glafira Rosales pleaded guilty and is now cooperating with prosecutors.Credit
John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times

More significant, that year, Ms. Rosales met Ann Freedman, then the president of Knoedler. Saying that she was working on behalf of a family friend, Ms. Rosales showed Ms. Freedman a painting that she said had been created by Mark Rothko.

The authorities said that it had actually been painted by Pei-Shen Qian, a Queens artist whom Mr. Bergantiños had discovered selling his art on the streets of Manhattan.

Recently interviewed in Shanghai by Bloomberg Businessweek, Mr. Qian said he was shocked to learn his handiwork had been sold as the original creations of renowned artists. He said that in the 1980s, Mr. Bergantiños saw him doing portraits on a West Village street and offered him $200 to do a replica of a Modernist masterpiece. Paid a few thousand dollars for each of his canvases, Mr. Qian said that Mr. Bergantiños told him he was making works for art lovers who couldn’t afford the modern masters.

The “Rothko” was the first of 40 works that Ms. Rosales would supply to Ms. Freedman over the next 14 or so years, all of which federal prosecutors say were painted by the Queens artist.

(Ms. Freedman testified as part of a civil suit that she never met Mr. Bergantiños. She has said she always believed that the art was authentic, that experts she enlisted had agreed with her, and that she saw no reason to check into Ms. Rosales’ background.)

Even as these sales were proceeding, though, Mr. Bergantiños was becoming entangled in several lawsuits. In 1995, Christie’s successfully sued him for nonpayment on a painting. A process server who showed up to serve the subpoena in that case later secured an order of protection against Mr. Bergantiños after the art dealer came running out of his Long Island home waving a shotgun, according to court records. Mr. Bergantiños acknowledged in a deposition filed in that case that a Christie’s vice president “told me that I could never step inside Christie’s again.”

In Spain in 1999, Mr. Bergantiños was accused of forgery, court papers say, but nothing ever came of the charges. In the Dominican Republic, he became involved in a nasty legal battle over multimillion-dollar real estate deal.

But at the same time he was cultivating powerful friends. In the Dominican Republic, where he established a second home, he made hefty contributions to the presidential campaign of a Social Christian Reformist Party candidate, according to a newspaper account. (The candidate lost.) He also befriended Joseph Zappala, the former ambassador to Spain under the elder President George Bush. The two would later buy two paintings together, a Leger and Picasso, at auction. (Mr. Zappala later sued Mr. Bergantiños in a dispute over them.)

Just as recurrent as lawsuits in Mr. Bergantiños’s life, though, are accounts of his generosity. Mr. Manso, his friend, remembered watching a television news report with him years ago about a man whose wheelchair had been stolen. Right then, “he picked up a phone and bought one” for the man, he said, spending $3,000 or $4,000.

In 2009, Mr. Bergantiños and his brother founded a charity, the Love & Life/Amor & Vida Foundation that according to its website, brings medical care, food and shelter to the needy in Latin America.

The site features reports and photographs of Mr. Bergantiños in places like Haiti, where the website describes how his foundation brought in a team of doctors and nurses after the 2010 earthquake. “Although we ran the risk of being shot by prison escapees in the chaos, it was all worth saving hundreds of lives,” the website reads.

The most recent photographs on the site are from June. Several show Mr. Bergantiños in Lisbon at the 104th International Rotary Convention, where he is wearing a large silver cross around his neck and smiling brightly. At the time, Ms. Rosales had already been arrested and was being held, without bail, in a federal detention center in Manhattan.

A version of this article appears in print on December 26, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Confidence, and the Art, Looked Real. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe